A little boy walks with his parents to the annual fair in Kangra. The lilt and joyous innocence of his excitement are contagious, and everything is a source of wonder and glee. Never had the dragonflies been so tempting.
Never had the blossoms been so redolently lovely. Never had nature been so rich and fecund.
At the fair itself, the child is all eyes, all ears, agog at the color of the vast crowd, at the sounds of the hawkers’ cries, at the smells of those mouth-watering jalebis, at the many things to buy and amusements to enjoy.
Everything he sees, he wants – a burfi, a garland, colored balloons to owing all the while that he cannot have them.
Most miraculous of all is the ferric wheel before which the boy stands raptly for a long time. Its enticements prove too much: The instant, recognition! They were not there, and he was Lost.
How on a sudden lost. In that single stroke of separation from his parents, innocence and security had fallen away, replaced only by dread and fear and trembling.
Upon the heels of the all-too-sudden knowledge of aloneness comes another kind if knowledge, that if human callousness: Every little inch of space here was cogitated with men but he ran through people’s legs, his little son lingering: “Mother, father!”
The crowd became very thick: men jostled each other, heavy men, with flashing, murderous eyes and hefty shoulders.
The poor child struggled to thrust away between their feet but, knocked to and fro by their brutal movements, he might have been trampled underfoot…
At last, one kind man protectively pucks up the boy. To distract and console him, he carries his charge from one stall to another.
Here, Anand parallels the end of the story with the beginning, fie they go back to the balloon man and to the roundabout and to the sweet vendor.
This time, though, the good man’s urgings that the child partake of all things that a little while before had been his heart’s desire are in vain.
In the last sentence of the prose poem, The child turned his face from the sweet shop and only sobbed: I want my mother, I want my father.
The subjective reality of mind, the pleasure principle, now is all gone, the conscience that is super-ego, punishes him by making him feel guilty.
This is revealed through his rejection of the objects around and his longing for his parents. The happy and excited face of the child in the beginning of the story stands in deep contrast to the sobbing, apprehensive face towards the end.
The child may be taken to represent human consciousness in the early stages of purity and innocence.
It is only when he comes in contact with reality that he becomes really susceptible to experience. And the experience is not always pleasant or wholesome.
His parting from his parents implies fall from grace and banishment from Eden. He strays into the hell of his own making because he cannot resist temptations.
His fall, like Adam’s, is the result of his inordinate cravings and desires. The fact that he renounces the once-cherished pleasures gives promise of a return to grace.
The lost child also reminds of the aphorism of Guru Nanak that we are all children lost in the world fair” and thus emanates from a basic poetic impulse – the song of innocence and experience in the mind of man.
Anand has shared his obvious inclination towards the psychological sense of security on the top of the hierarchy of one’s basic needs.
As this sense of security is the natural corollary of kin-bonds, specifically the parent-child relationship, its loss inevitably may lead to the dread of isolation, frustration, even to neurosis.
Anand seems to say that individual feels powerless, insecure, and isolated when the sense of securities offered by primary ties are withdrawn and he becomes aware of himself as a separate of the big family tree-taking whatever he has derived from the roots and developing his distinguished identity.
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